When everybody around started to use and talk about twitter, I preferred to stay away for a while in order to get the idea why so many people became twitter user and what I could make use of twitter. However, best way to learn about something is to get involved and explore, so eventually I’ve become a twitterer.

Before twitter, the best way for me to follow some person or news source was to use RSS feeds provided by the blog of that person or the web site of the news source. Today, I still effectively use RSS feeds for the same reason (mostly to read daily news). However, people usually have many more things to say but not to prefer to type into their blogs as posts. For example, I find a very good article about data mining, I want to share it to my followers, but it may not be feasable to write about that article in my blog. I don’t like to put a single-sentence blog post that only gives a link to the article. Then, twitter is very handy in such situations. I follow some important Computer Science researchers, and they usually give very useful links in their tweets besides links to their own new blog posts. I understand why use of tools like twitter and FriendFeed is called micro-blogging.

This basic usage style is more than enough for me to stay informed about people I follow. I have not got into deeper features of twitter like trending topics, lists, etc.

As long as used wisely, twitter is a simple, useful, and effective tool for information flow among people. I like it, I use it. You can follow me via @vtunali.

I guess it is very likely that you use Google everytime you need to search for something, and sometimes the others like Yahoo, Bing, etc. This is what I do. Google has been my very first choice for a long time. I very very rarely use Yahoo or Bing. Now, there is a newcomer to the field: blekko.

Blekko is in a private beta stage and it is not open to everyone’s use. You need to get a join link from blekko through twitter or facebook.

I’ve just joined to blekko and actually have not tried it thoroughly. The most distinct property of blekko is the search using slashtags. Slashtags are the keywords that appear after a slash, which makes the search results narrow down according to the tag. Slasthtags are defined by blekko as:

Slashtag search lets users slash in what they want and slash out what they don’t. Knock out the spam sites and search only the sites you want to search.

Use of slashtags are very similar to the command line parameters passed to the programs in DOS.

I think I need more time and more trials to get the idea. Who knows, blekko might become my first choice search engine soon.